Ohio EPA Takes One More Swipe at Rover Pipe with FERC Notice
Craig Butler (aka Captain Ahab) has risen up with the Ohio EPA (aka harpoon) one last time to see if he can skewer his great white whale, the Rover Pipeline (aka Moby Dick). According to Energy Transfer Partners, builder of Rover, the Ohio EPA, which Butler heads, has filed a Notice of Violation with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission as a backdoor attempt to prevent the final segments of the pipeline from going online. ET says the NOV is baseless. An ongoing delay in blocking several Rover lateral segments from going into service is causing economic harm to ET’s customers (and to ET). This isn’t the first, nor even second time Butler and OEPA have gone after Rover. It’s the upteenth time (see our Butler/Rover stories here). What’s the baseless charge this time? OEPA says Rover disposed of “spent” drilling mud containing low levels of the chemical solvent tetrachloroethene (PCE) without approval. Rover has fired back at OEPA in a letter to FERC, accusing OPEA of recycling the PCE issue after it had already been investigated and addressed…
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Anti-fossil fuel nutters are on a holy mission to stop a 3.5-mile, 8-inch pipeline from being built under the Potomac River by Columbia Gas, from Maryland to West Virginia (see 
One of the oft-repeated canards by antis is that having a drill pad near you, or a pipeline crossing your property, will devalue (lower the value) of your property’s assessment and worth. If you want to sell the property you won’t get as much for it–if you can sell it at all. Who wants to live near a big, ugly drill site, or have an “explosive” pipeline running near the house? Except you can’t even see a drill pad from more than a few hundred feet away after the wells are drilled, and when the pipeline is in the ground and replanted over the top of it–you don’t see or even think about it. Let’s take the later case, of pipelines. Is there evidence that when a pipeline passes through your property, the value goes down? According to property assessors in West Virginia, the answer is “no.” At least not in the short term. Longer term, they say, will have to be watched. IF there are more incidents like the landslide that caused the Leach XPress pipeline to explode, maybe there will be an impact on assessments. But then, if you live in an area where there are frequent landslides, you have bigger valuation problems than a pipeline running through it…
It takes a long time to build a natural gas-fired electric power plant–especially a big one. We began writing about one of the largest coal-to-gas conversion projects in the country, happening in the heart of PA Marcellus country, back in February 2014 (see 
The outspoken Bill Siderewicz, builder of a string of gas-fired electric generating plants in Ohio and elsewhere, is (surprise!) speaking out. Siderewicz, president of Boston-based Clean Energy Future, is the builder of the Lordstown Energy Center in Trumbull County, a project begun in 2016 and now nearing completion (see 
Northeast Natural Energy (NNE) is a small-to-midsized driller headquartered in Morgantown, WV. It’s a young company, drilling its first shale well in 2013. In April 2017 MDN reported that NNE had obtained $300 million of investment from two investment firms (see 
Although headquartered in Radnor, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia), Penn Virginia Corporation is an oil and gas driller with (at last check) only a small presence in the Marcellus Shale: 21,700 net acres with no drilled wells. They concentrate on oil drilling the Texas Eagle Ford Shale play. Penn Virginia is one of the Philly area’s oldest companies, started in 1882 by Philadelphia coal barons. It later transitioned into an oil company. MDN told you in March 2015 that Penn Virginia’s top stockholder, the vile corporate raider George Soros, forced the company to put itself up for sale so George can line his pockets with more cash (see 
The “best of the rest”–stories that caught MDN’s eye that you may be interested in reading: Baltimore files doomed climate lawsuit day after NYC’s lawsuit is tossed; Columbia Gas spending $29M on gas line replacements in central OH; CNX donates property for bats; federal court rules in favor of WV refinery against EPA; California tells residents to turn the AC off and the lights out; EPA under Scott Pruitt cut $350M in regulations; Halliburton sees slowdown coming in second half of 2018; NYC teen protesters learned about climate change from cartoons; enviro do-goodism the new religious cult of Millennials; how fracking revolution broke OPEC’s hold on oil prices; and more!